Make This List If You’re Burnt Out (It Changed Everything)

Sam Vander Wielen: So have you ever heard a quote for something on a day where you really needed to hear it? That happened to me the other day, so I was having like a particularly hard day just feeling a lot of anxiety. I was all frustrated and I heard somebody quote something from the Artist’s Way from the author, Julia Cameron. And the quote goes like this.

Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves. That part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough that we should try again.

And honestly, I heard this and I was like, whoa. Like I felt like it like knocked me off my feet. I never thought about perfectionism in this way. I’ll also admit, , this was really funny. I think I was on Jen Diaz’s, my friend Jen and Mindset Coach Jen’s, um, retreat back in like 2022 or three, um, in Mexico where a bunch of people were talking about perfectionism and I was like, I’m not a, I don’t consider myself to be a perfectionist.

I just like, everything has to go right. And it was just like one of these hilarious moments where I was just like, oh, wait a minute, I think I might be one of them. Like, it was so funny how I considered myself to be like so far out of it, you know? And I was like, uh, nope. There she is. Right in there.

And by the way, welcome back to On Your Terms®. If you’re new here, welcome. If you’re returning listener, I’m so glad that you’re here. On Your Terms® is a podcast for online business owners who want to be as present in their lives as profitable in their businesses, and we’re not going to be very present in our life or profitable in our business, if we don’t keep a little check on our perfectionistic tendencies, which I think pretty much we can all agree that we probably have some degree of.

So the day I heard this quote was a particularly spiraly day for me. Hopefully you’ve had one of those, and I’m not, I’m not alone in this, but my brain that day felt so wiry and like I just felt like I couldn’t, I couldn’t grab a hold of it, essentially. Like it was just one of those days where it felt like it was escaping me.

I felt like in my life in general, when this happened, I was doing a million things. Like I was balancing a million things at once. I wasn’t doing any of them well, like, and because I was balancing so many of those things, I was just like, I’m, I’m failing in all of these areas.

So when I got home, I sat down and just like, I just had this sudden urge, I’ve never done this before. I had this sudden urge to just grab a piece of paper and make a list of all of the things I realized I was trying to do perfectly. Like some without, I wasn’t even realizing that these things. But as I heard this quote and as I was feeling so scattered that day, I started realizing like, man, you are trying to do so much. Like so much.

A lot of my friends will tell me, especially those who are also creators or like in the online business space, they’ll be like, I think you do more in like a day than most people do in like a couple of weeks. You know?

And so sometimes I don’t even realize like how much, I’m just so used to knocking so many things out. I can get things done pretty quickly. And all of that just leads to be like thinking, I don’t know, be almost becoming like overly confident of like, well, I can handle all of these things at once, right? Without even realizing it.

So I sit down to make this list and it was hilarious. Like, I mean, some of these things on the list were like, I’m trying to hit a hundred ounces of water. I’m trying to exercise every day, but also my exercise routine has to be perfect because it all has to make sense. The exercise routine has to be a progressive o overload of, you know, the weights.

And then I gotta take a D load week, and I have to be doing that perfectly. I’ve gotta time the food perfectly before I workout because if I don’t eat perfectly before I work out, then I don’t feel good when I work out. Oh, also, I have to eat perfectly as soon as my workout’s done so that I maximize the muscle production within 45 minute window of having eaten.

And I’ve gotta get my night routine down. Like my night routine has to be perfect. I have to do. And this step, and this step in this order, or I won’t sleep through the night.

And I’m trying to build the perfect email list with the perfect people and send the perfect emails with the perfect subject line to make sure I get the perfect open rate and improve my perfect click through rate. Something that keeps me up at night, and we haven’t even talked about Instagram, and trying to perfectly keep up with all the algorithm changes and all the different ways I gotta show up or not show up online.

And then we add in all the life stuff. Like, you know, trying to be a wife to Ryan and not be, not be too bad at that either and not mess up so that I don’t make him feel this or that way.

Trying to be the best dog mom to Hudson and feeling so much guilt that his little knee got torn because maybe I had done something like maybe I should be giving him like glucosamine and chondroitin to help his joints and maybe this was my fault because I wasn’t perfectly feeding him, or you know, I don’t feed him the perfect dog food because when I got Hudson, my dad was dying and so I just did what was good enough and I’ve just stuck with it.

My office and my house isn’t perfectly clean and perfectly organized because I’ve got my dining room table right now covered in all of the things that I can’t seem to get myself to get to putting away, and I don’t honestly even know where to put them.

I’m not perfect at responding to people, but I was trying to, and trying to make sure that all my friends felt taken care of. Like I’ve responded immediately and everybody knows I’m available.

Everybody knows I’m helpful. I’m trying to be perfect to being helpful and trying to be perfect to trying to learn how to play tennis and do that right and perfect at my Hyrox training routine and improving my heart rate. By the way, that’s my HRV has been not what I’ve wanted, and so I’m trying to be perfect with that. The list literally went on and on.

This was like the start of the list. It just went on. From there to perfectly taking my vitamins, my perfect meals, you know, perfect timing of my carbs. Like it’s relentless. It was relentless.

I had to laugh looking at this list ’cause I was like, oh, okay so like you’re just trying to like do everything in life perfectly and be like a perfect specimen of a human.

That makes sense. You know? No. Like one human could sustain all of this. Like sometimes, you know, I’ve been on such a health journey since like summer of 2025 and trying to like heal some things that came up after the loss of my parents. And it’s helpful ’cause every once in a while you need a reset when it comes to this stuff that you realize like being so unquote perfect about all of it is actually causing more problems than it’s resolving. And so I realized like, wow, I had just like taken on a lot more than I could handle, and I was just making everything too rigid, too black and white, too perfectionistic to say like all the, I have to be doing all these things perfectly or else, or else, or else.

Making this list was actually an awesome release. Maybe I learned this when I was little, my mom used to do this thing, which I also do every once in a while, but my mom used to do this thing that she would call it a worry list, and so my mom would sometimes feel really worried about a lot of things. She was a single mom. She owned her own business. She was a doctor, and she would just get really worried sometimes about a million different things. And she would sit down, she would make this worry list in her journal, and then she would always set a date for herself six months later to go back and look at this worry list.

And the reason that she really liked it doing it this way was because she would tell me from a very young age, like Sammy, when I go back and I look at my worry list, none of that stuff happened. Or it happened and it was okay, or it happened and it worked itself out. Or like it went in a better direction than I could have imagined.

She would always joke that like she thought at some point she would have to like, she wouldn’t need to make worry lists anymore, but she would make them still throughout her life, all the way till the end. She would make worry lists and then she would look back on them and be like, oh, not so bad. So maybe this is where I got this idea.

Just like make this list and just, there’s something about seeing it in front of you. So tactical of like would you ask one of your friends, if you pretended like that list was a to-do list for your friend and you gave this to your friend, would you ever expect your friend to be doing all these things at once or would you be like, this is an insane, like insurmountable list for any person? So why would I expect it any differently For myself?

It’s not that the point of this exercise or like what I walked away with was that I had to give up every single one of those things. Some of them, it was like some of those was like, I don’t need to be doing this. I don’t need to be doing that. I don’t know why I’m doing this.

Others, it was just like, it’s okay if I, I don’t hit my protein goal for like one day, you know, several days, many days, right? Or many meals or it’s not perfectly timed. Or, you know what? Maybe right now in the season I’m in, working out is for fun. It’s for movement. I just thoroughly enjoy it. Maybe it’s not that I have the perfect program so that I’m making gains all the time. Like I don’t even know what gains I’m interested in making. So why am I putting all this pressure on myself?

I just sort of released my death grip on doing all of these things perfectly. I think a lot of this year, and probably a lot of this podcast is just gonna be a lot about like releasing our death grip. We all have our death grip on different things at different times, and this is certainly not the only one that I have, but it was really about releasing the death grip on this stuff.

I also just started folding in a lot of self-compassion for just how much I was holding. Like I would say the first step was just being like, man, no wonder you feel like this, like I would feel like that too if I had this kinda list and it, it was me, you know? So it was, it was like that was phase one and then phase two was like, how about I also fold in a little self-compassion for the fact that like I’m trying my best and like what are just like the couple of things I want to focus on, what are like two things out of here, not that I wanna do perfectly, but what is my focus?

Because maybe what’s causing me to feel so much angst and that kind of wiry brain that I talked about at the top, is the fact that I’m trying to do a million different things and I don’t know what exactly my focus is on.

So even if my big focus, for example, is improving my health, you know, making myself feel better again, like before I, you know, what I felt before my parents died essentially, or before, especially before my dad got sick.

If that’s the overall goal, well what are like two things on that list that I actually enjoy doing and like, what’s a healthier way that I can approach those two things? So like, you know, water’s been pretty important and eating enough protein has genuinely make it, turns out you need protein. I, I ate like zero grams of protein before I drank maybe 10 to 15 ounces of water. I’m not kidding you. I, I didn’t drink any water. I hated drinking water. So those were two things. It was like, okay, this is like objectively good. I don’t, it doesn’t have to be so perfect, but I realize that these things make me feel better and they have a ton of downstream effects. Like eating enough protein makes me feel fuller, it makes me feel more energy, I sleep better and then I work out better. All that stuff.

Drinking waters helped me with my immune system, my digestion, my skin, so many things. So it’s like so many downstream effects. So those seem like two good things I could focus on that are just like, this works for me also. Doesn’t mean I have to do them perfectly.

As perfectionist, I think we can come up with a lot of excuses about how our perfectionism serves us. I know that this is something like I’ve done a lot is like, yeah, well good thing I am. ’cause that’s why I am so successful. You know, like good thing I’m so anxious. ’cause that’s what makes sure that everything gets done on time.

Thank goodness I’m such a worry wart. ’cause I caught that problem the other day and I wouldn’t have caught it if I didn’t check Slack 46 times a day. Like, there’s just so many things. We, we all do this. I do this all the time. My husband does this all the time. He’s a accomplished professor, right? He always says like, well, I wouldn’t have gotten there without my anxiety.

I’m like, I mean, maybe, right? But like also, how’s that serving you now that you have accomplished all of these things?

So I’m so curious whether this is something that you struggle with too, how this comes up for you. I mean, I can certainly see this coming up in our businesses, right? And I was hoping by sharing this today, that maybe you would make your own, uh, perfection list for one. Uh, and two is that like, especially when it comes to your business. How many things are you trying to do in your business perfectly? Are you trying to be perfect on like six different apps while also starting a YouTube channel and maintaining a podcast and building an email list, and also building up your clients and like being the best coach or therapist or creative to them, right?

Like, are you trying to do all of these things perfectly all at the same time? Because if it were me and I was trying to grow my business, I would step back and I’d be like that’s a lot for one person to do. By me doing all these things in all these different places, I’m actually just like splitting myself up into a million different little pizza slices and like, I’m not able to give any of myself to any of these things.

And maybe that’s why it’s not growing, by the way, like just like maybe my health wouldn’t get better if I focused on a million different things that I couldn’t then do well. Right?

So. What kinds of things are you trying to do in your business in that way? And if you really had to step back and slim down, what are two things that you could focus on this month, this quarter, et cetera, that you could go deeper with those things while still adjusting your relationship to them.

Like maybe you want to grow your social following, right? And you have this idea of like, you have to show up every single day. It’s kind of like what people say about the gym. Like sometimes people will go from like nothing, like no movement to like, oh, I wanna go to the gym every day. Well, if you’re not doing anything right now, going to the gym consistently twice a week is gonna be a hell of a lot better than doing nothing. I think the same thing applies to being consistent in whatever way you want to grow your business.

So if your thing right now is about social media and you’re like, yeah, but I can’t do video every day, or I can’t post every day, or I can’t do that. Well, how about we pick a different way of being consistent and ease up on yourself, a little bit about the story that you’ve created, about what it means to be perfect on that platform.

Because the truth is too, that there are plenty of people, myself included, who are growing a lot on social media, for example, without doing the things that I’m sure you have, uh, a story around that needs to be done right? Like somebody just said to me., The other day when I was at my mastermind, they were like, nobody’s growing on social media because the only way you can do it is if you post a reel every day. And I said, oh, that’s so funny because I actually, like, it’s been a while now, like eight months or something maybe that I drop down to three times a week. , A posting on social media and we don’t always post, uh, like face to camera videos. So some of them are like B roll video images. So it can be like me making coffee or me sitting at a coffee shop. Everything has to do with coffee, but like sitting at a coffee shop, um, doing work or something like that, and they just throw some text over it. So like there are creative ways and it’s just not true as well by the way, that it’s like, you have to do this thing in this way in order to grow there. What if we just try to show up in the way that you can consistently and see how it goes and just ease up on yourself that like, yeah, that would be nice if I could do a reel every day, but I can’t.

So instead of it being five reels per week or zero, why don’t I try one? If I posted one reel consistently every single week, you’re gonna grow more than zero. So I just think that there’s a lot to be said about this kind of checking in with, first of all, how hard you’re being on yourself, and then like where can you just put some more of your focus and energy?

Some of those things can just, the other things in the list that don’t meet the one to two things criteria, those don’t have to go away forever, like put them on the back burner. Maybe next season you pick those things up. Maybe by next season, like kind of like my mom’s worrywart list by next season, you’re like, actually those things aren’t really that important to me anymore.

Turns out I spend some time on YouTube and I don’t really like it, so I’m gonna stop trying to do that perfectly. ’cause I don’t even like it and I, if I’m not gonna like it, I’m not gonna show up there consistently, which means it’s never gonna grow.

So make your perfection list of your own and see what parts of it you can giggle at. Like the way that I kind of laughed at myself and just saw like the ridiculousness that was this list. What parts of it can you relinquish? What parts can you let go? Where can you loosen your grip? What do you want to focus on?

I’d love to hear from you. Obviously you don’t have to share your list with me, but I would love to just like hear if this was helpful, what came up for you. If you wanna share your focus for this season based on whatever you made your list about, I’d love to hear from you. You can reply to any of my emails, or you can DM me on Instagram at Sam Vander Wielen. With that, I’ll chat with you next week. Thank you so much for listening. I’d absolutely love to hear.

Thanks so much for listening to the On Your Terms® podcast. Make sure to follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. You can also check out all of our podcast episodes, show notes, links, and more at samvanderwielen.com/podcast. You can learn more about legally protecting your business and take my free legal workshop, Five Steps To Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business at Samvanderwielen.com and to stay connected and follow along, follow me on Instagram at samvanderwielen and send me a DM to say hi.